U.S. abstention on UN vote is no surprise

Given Obama’s education, mentors and ideology, we should not really be shocked by his long-calculated decision to have the U.S. abstain from voting on UN Security Council Resolution 2334, ensuring its passage.

Israel-censuring 2334 is an effective repeal of Resolution 242, which promised Israel a “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries,” leaving unspecified which territories Israel would eventually withdraw from in a negotiated peace settlement. Far from encouraging the peace process, though, 2334’s denial of Israel’s legal sovereignty over sacred Jewish space, including the iconically Jewish Western Wall, short-circuits the need for “process” altogether and invites punitive action against Israel. In particular, all Israeli businesses supplying communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines — effectively all Israeli commerce — are now vulnerable to a global boycott.

We may be further angered, but should also not be surprised if, in his final days in power, Obama uses the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jan. 16, to reconvene the Security Council in order to offer “Palestine” full recognition and membership in the UN by arranging the resolution through some accomplice nation (Secretary of State John Kerry promised the U.S. would not put one forward itself ).

Obama came to office infused with a messianic sense of mission as America’s first post-nationalist president. In foreign affairs, he saw himself as a bridge over troubled waters, a healer of divisions between the Christian and the Islamic worlds. He believed his few childhood years in Indonesia gave him special insight into Islamic culture. He played up that his middle name was Hussein. No antiSemite, it was nevertheless soon clear that if push came to shove, Obama’s preoccupation with his Muslim charm offensive would render Israel’s interests expendable.

Obama’s instincts spring from a standard Marxist-style paradigm of victims (of colour) and victimizers (white). Obama was a disciple of Columbia University professor Edward Said, a former member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s governing council and academia’s most influential apologist for Palestinian terrorism (until he became disillusioned with Yasser Arafat for his “sellout” to Israel in the Oslo Accords). For such ideologues, Jews cannot be victims.

Obama didn’t hide his agenda. In a 2008 campaign debate with Hillary Clinton, he said he would talk to U.S. enemies “without preconditions.” Once in office, Mahmoud Abbas was one of the first foreign leaders Obama called. An early interview with Dubai-based TV network al-Arabiya created the opportunity to apologize for America’s past injustices to the Arab world.

Soon after, Obama embarked on his “apology tour.” In Turkey he informed the Muslim world that “America’s relationship with the Muslim world cannot and will not be based on opposition to al-Qaida.” In Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are outlawed, he bowed to King Abdullah.

And then the Cairo speech. In it Obama gave credence to the historically revisionist claim popular among Arabs that Israel’s statehood was a sop to European guilt, and implied Palestinian displacement was morally equivalent to the Holocaust: “Six million Jews were killed …. On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people … have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.”

Israel is the Jews’ ancestral home, never abandoned in their prayers or in fact, always inhabited by Jews. It is not theirs as a reward for suffering, but by indigenous right, a fact illuminated with clarity by the (pre-Holocaust) 1917 Balfour Declaration and the subsequent mandate adopted by the League of Nations, and followed by the UN.

The Palestinian territories were not stolen from Palestinians; they were liberated from Jordanian control. Until it became a modern political pawn, Jerusalem was never a sacred city for Arabs. Jews are not colonizers, they are the colonized: by Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Mameluks, Christians, Arabs and Turks. When Israel was re-established on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, Palestinians were never mentioned as stakeholders in the Balfour Declaration or subsequent documents, because they did not yet exist (Arafat created the identity in 1964). The issue is not Israeli intransigence, but pan-Arab Judeophobia.

Obama and Kerry impose double standards. Kerry claims democratic Israel, welcoming to all faiths, cannot be both a Jewish and a democratic state. Yet an undemocratic, Islamic, Judenrein (Jew-free) Palestine is, by implication, entitled to statehood. One has only to look at who is rejoicing over Obama’s action and Kerry’s verbal legerdemain to nose out the reek of scapegoating malice in this rotten slab of political jackal bait.

In foreign policy, Obama is America’s reverse Midas. At his touch, golden visions turn to policy dross. The most gratifying two words of 2016 were: “outgoing president.” Let’s build on them. @realDonaldTrump #UNexit. Pls RT.